UTM vs Marketo Cookie: Need Clarification

[Anonymous]

I am trying to capture lead source information using hidden fields on Marketo 2.0 forms on Marketo landing pages. I have thought about using UTM parameters, but my concern with this is that if someone navigates away from the conversion page or comes back later with a new session these parameters will be lost.

Does anyone know if Marketo automatically cookies this information with forms 2.0 so I could use cookies as the value source and then specify the parameter name, thereby solving for these concerns? If so, how long does the Marketo cookie store this information?

What type of information is available on the Marketo cookie anyway?

Is there a good resource I can review for this?

[Anonymous]

What I had my dev team build out was a combination of UTM and Munchkin where we capture UTM to source leads with hidden form fields, but will place the UTM in cookie as well. We hold this data for a "session" as defined by Google general "session" definition as to match our Google Analytics.

We also input referral URL into this cookie to which also passes through the hidden form fields upon lead conversion. I find this to be more accurate than Marketo's referral out of the box solution.

Pretty sure this wasn't done automatically with forms 2.0 and munchkin, but I can ask my developer later this week.

[SanfordWhiteman]

Tim, regardless of whether you save the document.referrer yourself or use the Mkto `Original Referrer`, you will lose some of what is colloquially called "referrer" info due to browser security restrictions. Just FYI.

[Anonymous]

Of course, can't be perfect in today's world of tracking.

[SanfordWhiteman]

Grant, Marketo will not automatically copy form field data into a cookie. (Of course, if you set the source of a hidden field to be a cookie, then by definition you also have a copy of the same data as a cookie.)  You can persist the data yourself if you want, but it will not happen unless you take steps (using the Forms 2.0 JavaScript API) to save it.

In fact, Marketo will not use a cookie at all unless you also load Munchkin (not required for Forms 2.0 to operate). When used, the _mkto_trk cookie is meant to be opaque.  It does not store any data that can be directly read, but rather connects your browsing history to a Marketo lead record.

[Iryna_Zhuravel4]

Hi Grant

I did something similar recently, so I'll add my 5 cents:

- Munchkin does not write data like utm parameters into somebody's cookies; however, Marketo Forms can pick up utm data from cookies and populate hidden fields with those values

- Adding utms into cookies should be done by your webdevelopers, we did it on external webpages where our forms are embedded, but it should be also possible to do on marketo landing pages through JS (I personally never did that on Marketo lp's, but see no reason why it wouldn't work)

- Make sure they use persistent cookie and give it a long enough time to live, it depends on how long your campaign is running, but I make mine live at least for a month or two. Again this depends on your needs, using session cookies might also be just fine. I prefer to store the info for sometime, in case people come back to our website in a couple of days

- To capture those utm values go to your form -> Hidden Field -> Autofill: Edit -> Get value from - select "Cookie value" and make sure to specify the name of the utm parameter you want the data to be captured from, e.g. utm_source, utm_medium etc

That's it, you should be good to go!

A few things to remember:

- if you want to track who clicked on your tracked link but didn't submit the form, use a trigger/filter Webpage is "www.example.com" and a constraint Query string "iryna-utm-campaign"; anything coming after "?" Marketo will not see as a part of the url, but as a query string value

- you still might loose some data because of people clearing their cache or using adblockers in their browsers

- sometimes people might come from a tracked page A, wonder around and then fill out a form on page B, so lets say you were running adwords for both page A and page B, then in some rare cases you would get someone with utm_campaign=pageA getting into the Page B campaign; it is also pretty good result as you got a conversion, just something to keep in mind

Hope it helps

*Original comment was edited to correct an inaccuracy pointed out by Sanford Whiteman​ below.

[SanfordWhiteman]

Iryna, just to be precise, Munchkin does not read cookies other than its own _mkto_trk.   Marketo Forms -- a different module -- is capable of filling hidden fields from cookies.

The distinction is important because you can use Forms without using Munchkin, and vice versa.   They are not dependent upon each other, though there are huge advantages to using both. When you combine the two technologies, you'll get automatic association of the _mkto_trk cookie with a Form-identified lead record, and (in environments in which it is supported) you can prefill Form fields from the Munchkin-associated lead record.

[Iryna_Zhuravel4]

Thanks Sanford, you are of course right, it's not the Munchkin that reads the cookie, too much time spent in Marketo today and yes, the combination of Munchkin and Forms bring the best results

[Anonymous]

Hi Iryna Zhuravel,

thank you for your response which actually helps us to understand it pretty well. I have got one question to you, how can you set up a time range for how long the cookie will be stored? Is it possible to do it within marketo environment?

Thank you for any information,

Jan

[SanfordWhiteman]

The default inactivity timeout is 730 days (2 years).  The timeout can be tweaked with the cookieLifeDays initialization parameter.

Munchkin.init('AAA-BBB-CCC', {
   cookieLifeDays: 365
});

Realize that Munchkin sessions are not like Google sessions. When you expire the cookie, you're declaring that a lead-associated session -- previously logging pageviews and clicks to the Activity Log of a known lead -- will be replaced with an anonymous session.  What's your exact reason for wanting this?